(5) The Work of To-day
We have now traced the development in the past of subject-matter and technique in British landscape painting in water-colour, and we have surveyed as well as our poor memories would enable us to do so—for the Museums have long been closed and most private collections are inaccessible, and it is therefore impossible either to verify or renew our earlier impressions—the differing aims and diverse achievements of a few of those who have made our national art so glorious and so memorable. We have done this because the careful and attentive study of the history of an art provides the best, and, indeed, the only, means by which we can educate ourselves to value and appreciate it. Historical studies enable us to enlarge our sympathies and discipline our tastes, so that the man who knows best what has been done in the past will be the first to appreciate the good work which is being done by living artists. He will also be the most indulgent critic of a young artist’s shortcomings, and the readiest to help and encourage him in his difficult struggle toward self-expression and mastery over his intractable material.
It is not, however, our business on the present occasion to praise the works with which this volume is enriched. In the first place, to do so is quite unnecessary, because the works are here to speak for themselves, or rather such excellent colour-reproductions of them that almost all their charm and beauty have been preserved; and, in the second place, to do so would be impertinent, because the fact that these drawings have been selected by the Editor of THE STUDIO for publication in this way is a sufficient guarantee of their merit and importance. I shall, therefore, confine my remarks rather to the general character of their subject-matter and treatment than to their individual excellences. In this way the following observations may be taken as an attempt to continue to the present day the survey of the past which occupied us in a previous chapter.
In tracing the development of subject-matter in the works of the artists of the nineteenth century we have seen that they generally gave prominence to the place represented, with all its historical and literary associations. Whistler was the chief exception to this tendency, as in his work the decorative and emotional elements of the picture itself were most prominent. Whistler’s example has been followed by many of the living artists. Men like Clausen and Mark Fisher are shy of any suggestion of what has been called “literary subject” or “guide-book” interest. But though the works of such artists, from their absence of topographical interest, seem to claim classification as poetical landscapes, yet, if we compare them with the earlier poetical landscapes of men like Lambert, Zuccarelli, George Smith of Chichester, and the elder Barret, we find they have undergone a very thorough change of character. The older work owed more to the study and imitation of the Old Masters than to the study and representation of Nature. In the place of formulas and motives borrowed from Claude and Poussin the modern men give us their own interpretations of what they have seen and felt in the presence of Nature. So that if we take a drawing like Mark Fisher’s Landscape, reproduced in the present volume (Plate VI), we find that it is, or at any rate that it looks as though it is, the representation of an actual place, though the place is unnamed and therefore devoid of any historical or literary interest to the spectator. Such a drawing may therefore very well be classed as topographical, though the topographical matter is used in the service of other than strictly topographical purposes.
However, in the works of other distinguished living artists, like Matthew Hale, Albert Goodwin—whose Lincoln is here reproduced (Plate VIII), Hughes-Stanton, Lamorna Birch, Wilson Steer, Rich, Gere, etc., we often find a similar use of topographical matter for the purposes of poetical expression, but at the same time they show a marked preference for the choice of subject-matter enriched by historical and literary associations.
The majority of drawings here reproduced are the outcome of their painters’ loving and tireless effort to render the appearances of Nature in their exact tones and colours. There is little of conscious artifice or preoccupation with abstract design of form or colour in drawings like C. M. Gere’s vivid presentment of light—The Round House (Plate VII), Eyre Walker’s Pool in the Woods (Plate XIII), R. W. Allan’s Maple in Autumn (Plate XV), George Houston’s Iona (Plate XX), or in Mark Fisher’s Landscape. But though their aims, broadly speaking, are the same, viz. the truthful rendering of particular effects of light and particular scenes, yet each work is different from each, and each is personal and individual, because the artist has painted only what he liked and knew best.
In other cases, generally in the choice of subject-matter, one is often reminded of the works of the older men, only to realize as the result of the comparisons thus provoked the important differences which distinguish the new treatment and justify the repetition of the same motives. Sir Ernest Waterlow’s In Crowhurst Park (Plate XIV), for instance, calls up memories of David Cox, of E. M. Wimperis, Tom Collier and many others who have delighted in such wide surveys of rolling down and moving cloud. But Sir Ernest’s work holds its own against all our historical reminiscences; it is so vivid, so evidently the outcome of the artist’s experiences, so freely and confidently set up. Robert Little’s Tidal Basin, Montrose (Plate X), Lamorna Birch’s Environs of Camborne (Plate V), and Murray Smith’s On the Way to the South Downs (Plate XXII), justify themselves in the same way. How easily, too, can we imagine Girtin or Cozens painting the scene which Russell Flint has portrayed so vividly in his April Evening, Rydal Water (Plate XIX). Yet how differently they would have painted it!
In all this one sees the Naturalistic movement begun in the nineteenth century still at work, with its inevitable tendency towards Pantheism—its exaltation of Nature at the expense of man and the individual. Moralists have dwelt upon its dangers in the deadening effect it is supposed to produce upon the sense of individual responsibility and freedom of will. But with results like these before our eyes we are more inclined to dwell upon its advantages, its enlargement of our sympathies and knowledge.
But the tendency is not altogether in the direction of Pantheism. There is a group of artists, among whom I will only mention D. Y. Cameron, A. W. Rich, Albert Goodwin, and C. J. Holmes, which manfully upholds the supremacy of the artist over Nature. The influence of the art of the past has counted for more in works like Cameron’s Autumn in Strath Tay (Plate XVIII), Rich’s Swaledale (Plate XI), Goodwin’s Lincoln, and Holmes’s Near Aisgill (Plate IX), than Nature herself. In these drawings the free-will of the individual triumphantly asserts itself. They are what they are because their makers loved art and particular forms of art first of all, and wanted to imitate them. Their inspiration came from within (from human nature) and not from without (from physical nature). But this is not to say that they are mere copies of other men’s works, for obviously they are nothing of the kind. They are at least as original and individual as any of the other drawings of which we have spoken. And these artists, too, study Nature just as keenly and as indefatigably as the realists, only their methods of study are different. With works like those illustrated in this volume—so different in aim and method, yet each so virile, sincere and personal—it is evident that water-colour painting is still a distinctly living art in this country. The British water-colour painters of to-day are “keeping their end up” as well as our soldiers, sailors and workers in other spheres, and, like them, they have earned the right to face the future with hearts full of confidence and hope.